For more than 400 years, scholars from an array of disciplines
have recognized Theodor de Bry's 1590 edition of Thomas Hariot's A
briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia as a book
whose influence shaped contemporary European perceptions of North
America, as well as subsequent research on that period for
centuries to come.
The book, upon which the present volume is based, is from the
collections of the Library at the Mariners' Museum. It is extremely
rare, containing hand-colored illustrations from the period, and is
one of only three recorded copies with colored plates. This
complete facsimile edition presents de Bry's exceptional
engravings, based on John White's sixteenth-century watercolors, in
their original hand-colored form. The book is available in
paperback and as a limited cloth edition of two hundred numbered
copies. Both editions are printed by the award-winning Stinehour
Press.
As the first volume in de Bry's celebrated Grand Voyages, a
series of publications chronicling many of the earliest expeditions
to the Americas, this book, which incorporates a 1588 text by
Thomas Hariot, was illustrated and published in four languages. It
became for many Europeans their first glimpse of the American
continent. Accompanying the Latin facsimile is an English text. The
first section is modernized from earlier versions of the English,
and the second part, which accompanies the plates, is newly
translated from the original Latin.
In addition to a valuable introduction, the book includes two
illuminating essays. The first, by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, examines
the early American settlement and tells how a collaboration between
the writer and mathematician Thomas Hariot and the artist John
White (later governor of the Roanoke Colony) evolved into a rich
study not only of English colonial life but of the Indian culture
and the natural resources of the region. The second essay, by Peter
Stallybrass, uncovers new information in the much studied plates
and presents an intriguing theory about the creation and importance
of the engravings.
This facsimile edition will appeal to students and scholars in
several fields of study, from American history and ethnography to
fine arts and the history of the book, and will provide the reader
with the best illustration of the New World as it was first
presented to the Old.
Published for the Library at the Mariner's Museum
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